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One of the things Mozilla could do is to make Flash run better. One of the few things Mozilla CANNOT do is to make Flash run better. Flash is closed source, pr

by rockdoe 11y ago

One of the things Mozilla could do is to make Flash run better. One of the few things Mozilla CANNOT do is to make Flash run better. Flash is closed source, proprietary software, owned by Adobe. Google did their own implementation (of at least the browser interface + sandbox), I supposed after signing plenty of NDA and handing money over. That's not something Mozilla can (or should) do as an open source project. Whatever plans you will go looking for at Mozilla, you'll never find "improve Flash" in one of them, even as an option. It just isn't possible. It's like asking Mozilla to make Office run better. They've offered Shumway as an interdependent re-implementation, but I'm guessing it has tons of compatibility issues as Flash isn't a standard. You're probably better off just uninstalling Flash in Firefox, to be honest.

AndrewDucker 11y ago
Flash runs better in Chrome than it does in Firefox. Therefore, either the Flash people are deliberately detecting that it's being run in Firefox and slowing it down, or Firefox is doing _something_ which has made it stutter intermittently on every PC that my wife plays Facebook games on. Would you care to hazard a guess as to what might be going on?
- pcwalton 11y ago
  Google is essentially maintaining Flash for Chrome at this point, with the PPAPI port.
- Mikeb85 11y ago
  Chrome maintains their own build of Flash (presumably after an agreement with Adobe). Firefox doesn't. It also doesn't update flash for you, you need to do that. That's the difference.
- cpeterso 11y ago
  Chrome's Flash plugin uses Google's Pepper plugin API (PPAPI) instead of NPAPI. So Google can more tightly integrate Flash and Chrome. I've heard from someone familiar with the code that Google's Flash "uses 110% of the documented Pepper API", meaning there is lots of undocumented or underspecified details.
cpeterso 11y ago
On the contrary, "improve Flash" is part of Mozilla's projects to reduce Flash and plugin problems in Firefox. (I'm a program manager at Mozilla coordinating some of this work. :) We work with Adobe to identify and fix Flash crashes collected by Firefox's crash reporter. We've made NPAPI plugin initialization asynchronous to avoid Flash blocking page load. We're also prototyping a new plugin sandbox to replace Adobe's Flash sandbox (which is based on an outdated fork of the Chromium sandbox). Here is more information about some of the plugin work: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Flash https://wiki.mozilla.org/Flash

by rockdoe 11y ago

AndrewDucker 11y ago

Flash runs better in Chrome than it does in Firefox. Therefore, either the Flash people are deliberately detecting that it's being run in Firefox and slowing it down, or Firefox is doing _something_ which has made it stutter intermittently on every PC that my wife plays Facebook games on. Would you care to hazard a guess as to what might be going on?

pcwalton 11y ago
Google is essentially maintaining Flash for Chrome at this point, with the PPAPI port.
Mikeb85 11y ago
Chrome maintains their own build of Flash (presumably after an agreement with Adobe). Firefox doesn't. It also doesn't update flash for you, you need to do that. That's the difference.
cpeterso 11y ago
Chrome's Flash plugin uses Google's Pepper plugin API (PPAPI) instead of NPAPI. So Google can more tightly integrate Flash and Chrome. I've heard from someone familiar with the code that Google's Flash "uses 110% of the documented Pepper API", meaning there is lots of undocumented or underspecified details.

cpeterso 11y ago

On the contrary, "improve Flash" is part of Mozilla's projects to reduce Flash and plugin problems in Firefox. (I'm a program manager at Mozilla coordinating some of this work. :) We work with Adobe to identify and fix Flash crashes collected by Firefox's crash reporter. We've made NPAPI plugin initialization asynchronous to avoid Flash blocking page load. We're also prototyping a new plugin sandbox to replace Adobe's Flash sandbox (which is based on an outdated fork of the Chromium sandbox). Here is more information about some of the plugin work: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Flash https://wiki.mozilla.org/Flash